The New Yorker Radio Hour - Remembering a City at the Peak of Crisis

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

April 15, 2020, was near the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, which was then its epicenter. On that day, a crew of New Yorker writers talked with people all over the city, in every circumstance and walk of life, to form a portrait of a city in crisis. A group station manager for the subway talks about keeping the transit system running for those who can’t live without it; a respiratory therapist copes with break-time conversations about death and dying; a graduating class of medical students gets up the courage to confront the worst crisis in generations; and a new mother talks about giving birth on a day marked by tragedy for so many families. The hour includes contributions from writers including William Finnegan, Helen Rosner, Jia Tolentino, Kelefa Sanneh, and Adam Gopnik, who says, “One never knows whether to applaud the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life, or look aghast at the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life. That’s the mystery of the pandemic.”    This episode originally aired on April 24, 2020.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I don't even know if this thing is working. Well, I guess it is. Seems to be shown my voice there. Yeah, so it's really quiet, and it is 538 a.m. A. A.m. A guy rides his bicycle down here, and is at a bench, and is doing some kind of leg exercises. and he is the only human around on the boardwalk besides me. On April 15, 2020, the writer Ian Frazier was in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn

to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean. The day that was dawning, like the ones that had preceded it, was going to be dreadful. We were suffering, all of us, the first hideous wave of a pandemic that in a year's time would kill more than a half million Americans. We're in an epicenter of a disease. The reason that this is an epicenter is that nature made this as a perfect place

for things to come together. I mean, the way the saltwater and the freshwater combined, the way, you know, the sound and New York Harbor and the Hudson River coming in and then these islands, this archipelago, and it's just such a perfect combination. I really feel like you just see God here because you see massive things happen.

That's, I think, Rockaway Point, and that is Sandy Hook. And those two points funneled the surge during the hurricane, during Sandy, and it just sent water like just blasting over to Staten Island. I mean, it just, it's like God just saying, pay attention! you know, like, here's a revelation

of what the future is going to be like. You're going to get slapped upside the head by nature like you've never seen. In that first wave, New York was the national, even the global epicenter of the pandemic. Life had come to a halt. The city was in every sense, funereal. There were refrigerated trucks

parked near the hospitals to handle all the bodies, funeral homes and hospitals were overrun. And yet the city persevered because, after all, what choice is there? I came from a small town and I would have friends visit me. And they would say, you know, oh God, I was so scared on the subway. You know, I thought everybody was going to mug me. And I say to them, if you're in a reasonably full subway car, you can be reasonably sure that there are a couple people in that car

who could save your life. If you fell down with a heart attack, there are people that could do CPR. There's probably doctors. There's nurses. The resources of the people, you know. It just makes us all New York City patriots. This episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour

tells the story of just one day in New York City as the COVID crisis was reaching a peak. It was recorded on April 15th, on Zoom, on cell phones, and in person. We broadcast it one week later, and we wanted to play it for you again today to mark the anniversary of the lockdown. Now it's really quite light. The sun has been up for three minutes, and you would have no idea where. I think it's like right, I think it's over in there.

Not long after sunrise, Jermaine Jackson, a group station manager for the subway system, was heading to work. William Finnegan called her a while later. Hello. Hi. I can hear you now. How are you doing? Germain Jackson is a group station manager on NYC Transit, the subway system. She's responsible for 13 stations in Midtown, Soho, and the Lower East Side. I'm actually off the phone with you. I'm going to head out and move up with the contract I spoke to you about yesterday.

They're cleaning off some room for me at Delancee Ethics Complex. I'll be delivering supplies, some PPE masks. skin gloves, hand sanitizer, you know, I'll carry that in a little trolley and I usually drop it off to the agent. It's amazing to me that you guys are, that you are going forward with, you know, renovations, cleaning out rooms that you want to do something with while all this is going on. You're just carrying on. Yeah, I mean, I won't say it's business as usual, but, you know, we still have responsibilities. and we are handling everything, but, you know, I'm not going to let COVID be me.

Jermaine lives in Queens, and her 81-year-old mother lives with her, said she's just on lockdown. She hasn't been allowed out of the house since the beginning of March, and they wouldn't even let her go out and collect the mail. They collect the mail, and they wipe it down. Jermaine says, you know, that while she's been lucky, that she nonetheless recognizes that she's the hazard. I didn't see my mom this morning because I was,

I leave so early to head out. I catch the 615 trains about 545, 550. I'm going, she's sleep. But I usually set up stuff for her the night before, you know, what she should eat when I come home. I always take her temperature, you know, just check to see how she's doing with my mask going after I wash my hands and everything.

And then I kind of prepare myself and take a shower. I do the steaming of my lungs to just kind of like clear away the outside world, if you will. Oh. Is that in the bathroom? You steam up the room? No, I actually do it in the kitchen. I bore water with off the peel,

lemon peel, garlic and salt and stuff like that. And I just inhale and just kind of really work the lungs and kind of clear out my system. So I went down on the subway on Wednesday, first time in a few weeks, ever since it's become, you know, essential workers only. And I went into 34th Street Herald Square Station, huge station. and it was pretty much deserted. I mean, it's supposed to only see essential workers, but she did say there are actually another group

that is still taking the subway, which is the elderly. You know, I really have a sore part to them. I'm going to tell you, they're still out there, and I look at them and they have one in their masks, but you've got to remember, you know, people that live in Manhattan, the city, these are where my stations are at.

They don't drive. They rely on public. transportation. So when they're out there, they're going to a doctor's appointment. You still have cancer patients. You still have people that's on dialysis. You still, you know, but they may not can afford an Uber or a yellow taxi, you know, so they have to come into the station. And when I look at them, I do look at them with an empathy because I think of my mom. And just I watch them as if they're my own parents. And once I see them, they don't even sometimes see me. I just make sure they get on the train.

And they're okay. And then I'll walk on, I'll keep my inspection going or something like that. So. Wow. It's a whole world down there. How many people are on board right now? Is it just you and the mate? Or what's your situation?

No, you have a mate. You have a captain, a mate, an engineer decade. Okay. Across New York Harbor, Jack Benton is starting his workday with a call from our writer. Burkart Bilger. Tug boats like Jack Bentons are absolutely crucial in the harbor. The big container ships can't make it to dock without them. So what's it like, I mean, right now, are you guys practicing social distancing on board the tug? How are you guys dealing with this thing? We're living on here no different than, I don't know, if you have a wife and kids. Yeah.

So it's no different than you at your house. How much did you and your wife's social distance? Yeah, right, right, right. And mainly what we're doing is we're making sure everything stays clean, wiped down, especially all your high touch areas, scenes, toilet handles, showers. Believe it or not, the control units up here that you steer. We're basically not leaving the vessel. We don't even go to the store to grocery shop. Our company, I'll give them that.

They've really went out of their way. They have a ship handler that's delivering the groceries. And then as far as the vessels go, they don't want our crew over on another vessel right now. When you're in Harbor, do you usually, do you have an apartment you go to and spend the night? Or do you always stay on the boat for a... No, we live on the boat. We're on the boat 24 hours a day. And that's true whether you have the disease, the virus or not.

That's your... Correct. Yes, we were social distancing before it was cool. And quarantining, right? Yeah, actually, it's true. We've been practicing quarantine. That's what me and my wife were talking about for years. How does it work with your wife?

I assume she can't come on board. She's got it way worse than me right now. Oh, does she? Well, I mean, you think about it. I'm here. She's working from home and homeschooling three kids, so I got it pretty easy. Yeah, she's,

That's what I said. My wife told me last week, by the time I got home, we were definitely going to be at least one child short. And I told her, I said, honey, I said, don't do that. I said, tax right off. I said, just remember. It's the whole reason we had them. I mean, the other thing about quarantine, I think for most people,

is they're just not used to being, even if they love their family, they're not used to being cooped up with them for that long. You know, it's funny you brought that up because I seen a thing on Facebook that said, all the divorce lawyers are just sitting at home waiting for the quarantine to be over. Well, I mean, for one, you have to be around people that you kind of have common interest in. And for me, I prefer happier people. Yeah. It's funny, misery seems to spread much faster than happiness.

So if you get one guy that's like always glass half empty, if you're around somebody like that, it's much harder to bring them up than it is to bring you down. Right, right. Most people that are like that, they don't make it out here. Right, right. They usually leave on their own. Has there any been any change in the kind of stuff you're hauling

or has the COVID affected that at all? Or is it just business as usual going to people? pickup regular. It's still the same ships. They're loaded with, you know, some of them, 12,000 containers. There's no telling what is in them. You're about, I mean, you're almost as essential as it gets, right? Because if you aren't having those container ships in, everything grinds to a halt, right? All the food deliveries, the equipment deliveries. And I agree with you, but I also know I'm perfectly safe right here. Right, right, right. I think there's a lot difference when you know you're walking into health, these nurses, doctors, and stuff. Those people

know every day they're going into a building that people are positive with this. You only think that you possibly could come into contact when you're out and about working. Those people know. Jack Benton's talking here about people like Julie Easton. She's the director of respiratory therapy at the State University Hospital in Brooklyn, which is known as downstate. She oversees the technicians who run those absolutely crucial ventilators. You know, you try and watch them for signs of that they've just had too much. Uh-huh. You know, that exhaustion, everybody's tired, and you've got to push people a little bit,

but you also got to know when somebody's done too many days in a row. you know there's a you have your little group that you kind of spend a little time with to shake off the day or whatever where would you go even cafeteria is pretty much shut down in fact if you walk through there it's filled with beds

okay the just in case beds okay so we were sitting in the supervisor's office and there were four of us I think in there and then somebody else stopped in the doorway. And it was just kind of this routine conversation of,

oh, did you hear about, you know, who passed away last week? You know, did you hear about the guy, oh, and his wife too? And did you hear about this one? Oh, God, I had heard about that one yet. And then one of the supervisors going, just stop. Just don't talk about this anymore. I don't want to know their names. It's hard.

Yeah. And I know there's a lot more that I don't know about. Yeah. You know, I don't, you can't internalize all of them. Yeah. And still function. Yeah. And you know, you know that your staff have family members are worried about.

Yeah. Have you had staff members who have come down with COVID? Do you have? Yeah, I had to put another one out yesterday. Oh, really? That seems like the latest guidelines are. you're only out for eight days. Right now, if you're asymptomatic, you're coming to work.

You know, we're kind of in this trench together. You know, when people are talking about the lack of toilet paper and the fact that they're bored in their house and those things, you know, I spent 15 minutes this morning just sitting on the edge of my bed going, God, I would give anything to be quarantined today. You know, I'm tired. all tired.

Yeah, yeah. None of us are going to be the same. In what way is doing? Well, hopefully some good ways. You know, maybe there'll be some things we'll take less for granted. You know, that people that you see in the hallway are going to be there tomorrow. Huh.

You know, a lot of the people we lost are at Downstate aren't people that I was super close to, but I would see on a regular basis. Yeah. You know, hello, hi, how you? doing in the hallway and you just kind of expect that every day you're going to see that person comes to kind of have your routines you know we can't take for granted that they're all going to be there tomorrow yeah it's hospital's been hit hard yeah a lot of people who work here from the neighborhood

yeah julie eason is the director of respiratory therapy at SUNY downstate medical center in brooklyn and she spoke with robert baird we'll continue in a moment with a city at the peak of crisis a special episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Just over a year ago, March 11th, I went to work like so many others,

only to turn around and go home. A suspected COVID case had been reported in our building, one World Trade Center. On March 22nd, the governor issued something called New York State on pause, all in an effort to contain the pandemic. Total hospitalizations.

Clickdown, still in the 18,000, but it clicked down. Good news. But the virus was already rampant. Lives lost yesterday, 752, which is the painful news of our reality day after day, and they are in our thoughts and prayers. By now, a year later, more than 2.6 million COVID deaths have been reported around the world, a fifth of them, in the United States alone. Our entire program today was recorded last year on April 15th when New York was near the first peak of the crisis, as we struggled to cope and hold on to some semblance of normality. Hello. Hey, how are you doing? Give me one second.

Do you have an order? Russ and Daughters on Houston Street is one of those stores that people call an institution. You go there for locks, for whitefish, for sturgeon, everything smoked and delicious. This is the biggest challenge right now. So we're open, but we're not letting customers in the store. And customers want to roll up and come in and shop. So we have to tell them they have to call and place an order. There was a couple.

I said, oh, you need to call. She said, oh, great, I'll call right now. I was like, okay, but we may not have it ready right now. And then her boyfriend or husband or whoever was said, come on, let's go. Did she seem upset or like... No, she was fine. We're all stressed out and freaked out and sometimes you just want a sandwich

and if you can't get it, it's annoying. Yeah. When Helen Rosner got on a video call with Josh Russ Tupper, the co-owner, he was wearing a blue medical mask secured to a cap by elastic bands. Have you guys ever closed like this before? No.

During Sandy, we were open. A friend of mine brought a generator back here and got our refrigerator refrigerators running. And the blackout, we were open as well. Yeah, so this is unprecedented. This is the first for us. So you can call us and pick up an order, but we're not letting anyone in. Okay. And give us some time.

Okay. Well, it's a small order. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. How are you doing, all right? You know, we're hanging in. Hi, you have an order? Yes, I know.

What's the name? Ruffini is here to pick up. What's in her order? Two quarter pounds of fish, quarter pound of cream cheese, maybe a bagel or two. So like a small little order. Yeah. We're taking the orders we can, and then someone wanted a quarter pound of wiper salad that we're doing whatever we can.

Yeah. Because that quarter pound of wiper salad means a lot to someone right now. Picking up. You have to call in an order. Yeah, but it might not be immediate. It might be a little while. But we're not letting any customers in, and we'll bring it out you when it's ready.

Okay, sure. Josh's cousin, the co-owner of Russ and daughters, is Nikki Russ Federman. That day, she had delivered 200 donated meals to the Brooklyn Hospital Center. So how did the delivery go? It went great. We were met by this guy, Mohamed,

who's usually like involved in business affairs for the hospital but there's no business you know So he's one of their poor people for receiving Donations like ours so he was really nice and they were very grateful It's a weird contrast because it's such a beautiful day out like crystal like skies There the hospital had like all these beautiful like cherry blossoms and bloom and tulips and for a moment you could be like what's the big deal and then all you need to do is look to your left and you would see two 18 wheeler tractor trailer refrigerated trucks that you know makeshift morgues on the street the first time i saw it was was pretty shocking but um when was the

first time you saw it i think popped up like it's probably been like four days now did you know they were when you saw them. Yeah. Yeah. When we spent through with the DOA, we called an IPA like 308. What's up? How you doing? How you doing, Tudu?

Congratulations on growth and development. Mixed. Thank you. I appreciate it. Is right now supposed to be a time when you were supposed to be on tour nationwide? I mean, how much did you have dates booked everywhere? What was it, what was this spring supposed to be like? I probably didn't even rolling out shows, interviews.

Hell yeah. We just gave back 20,000 in deposits. Oh. Shit. 2-2Gs is a hip-hop artist who's gotten pretty big these days, and like musicians all over the country and the world, his spring tour is canceled. He's riding out the quarantine in Flatbush in Brooklyn, where Kelifasana caught up with him. Man, I love that video you threw up on Instagram of 308.

You got the can of Lysol, the kind of a... kind of blue matching your sweatshirt? Trying to stay corona free right now. Can you get it out there, or is there a Lysol drought in the streets? Yeah, it might be a Lysol enhanced sanitizer drought right now. So how do you think about your days?

All you can do is just eat, sleep, get hot. I don't even got a schedule, bro. Are you something who's custom to being up until 2, 3, 4 in the morning? 5, 6, 7, 8 in the morning, then go to sleep, wake back up at 2, stay up again, it's crazy.

So you're just waking up right now? Yeah, almost. I mean, it's funny because it was always such, you know, New York and I think all throughout hip-hop, it was always such an insult to call someone like an internet gangster, right? This idea that, you know, people that weren't out on the block that were just, you know, talking tough on the computer. Yeah, that's not something that's cool. But now everyone's on the computer.

Do you have plans for what your next video is going to be? You're looking around to see what props you have in the apartment? Come on, we got deluxe. We got deluxe honey in a spot. Let me show you how it's going. That's some Hennessy right there. Some elite brand. Some elite brand Hennessy?

Yes, sir. You got enough bottoms to last you about how long? Until Corona's over. Entertainers of every kind are trying to figure out what to do with themselves. You might have seen NBA and WNBA stars recently playing horse in their driveways on ESPN. That was a pandemic thrill. And at NBC Studios in Midtown, the famous 30 Rock, Studio AG is dark.

On any normal afternoon, Seth Myers would be rehearsing his late night show with a live audience. But on April 15th, his desk is just gathering dusk. There's no crew, no audience, and Seth's at home in his attic. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the attic crawl space. On Monday, we answered a question

many viewers have been wondering about what's behind that tiny little door back there when my kids escaped at the end of our closer look. Now, a lot of people online have said they were adorable and too cute for words, and I assure you they are in nine second chunks. Hi, Seth. How are you? Good. How are you? That's Michael Schulman. Can you just tell me how it feels to be writing and performing your show from your attic crawl space?

The performing part is just weird, you know, not ever having any feedback as far as whether or not a joke is working. do you hear these deafening silences where, you know, laughter would normally be? I mean, how do you reassure yourself that any of this is working? I mean, you just, it really is like just a leap of pace. And mostly you just try to, you know, find happiness and the fact that you're getting to do it at all, as opposed to what we thought when this started that we weren't going to be able to do the show as soon as we left the studio. So to have a solution in any way to perform, you're willing to make concessions, and the biggest one is no feedback. What is the biggest logistical challenge for you?

In the beginning, it was just figuring out how to do it. There were some people on Twitter who immediately were like, oh, buddy, you've got to get a lav mic. You sound terrible. You can't use the sound from an iPad. And I just engaged with them and said, which one? And they would say this one, and then I would buy it. I'd write it back and say, is it better, and they say it is getting better, but you have to move it higher up. And it was really great to sort of crowdsource the process.

And then it was, you know, it was just basic things. Like, you know, I downloaded a teleprompter app and figuring out, you know, how fast to set it so that I could read it in natural speed that didn't seem like it was dragging or racing. You know, in the regular show in the studio, our Q card guy, Wally Ferrisen, who's been. doing my cards since weekend update. He knows exactly my rhythms and when to slow down and when to speed up. And, you know, with an app, you obviously don't have that luxury. So it's just little things like that,

that with all things, repetition is made a little bit easier. Right. Some of you might be looking at me right now wondering, does Seth know he's already worn that shirt? And yeah, I know. I promise you, I know. And I do wish I had a deeper roster of shirts, but in my defense, no one warned me

multiple times about the possibility of a pandemic because I'm not the president. That's a segue. Is there anything kind of invasive about having, you know, America see you're at a crawl space? Like, do you feel weird about that? I think, I feel like a lot of people feel weird

about Zoom calls now and everyone's seeing their homes. I've come to terms with letting them see that corner. What's on the outside of the room? Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. It's just the other day. Someone's like, should show the other side of the room and I will admit I'm not. There's nothing bad, but I'm happier

with a smaller amount of my home on the camera. You know, it's funny. People always talk about when their children, they like pretend to do their own talk show in their bedroom. And I just, I feel like you've gone full circle and now we're actually doing that. Yeah. It is also just, I can't get past that I feel like a liar every time I tell my kids I'm going upstairs to do a show. It seems dumber than anything they would ever try to get by me.

Sporting events likely won't return until fall 2021 at the earliest in a Harvard study said yesterday some social distancing measures may be needed until 2022. So yeah, I'm gonna have to re-watch every episode, Island, with the director's comment.

commentary on. Seth Myers talking with Michael Schulman. Throughout this hour, we've heard the New Yorkers writers documenting life in New York City on April 15th, 2020. Among them was Adam Gopnik. All right, I'm just at Central Park on 89th and 5th Avenue, watching all the runners go around the reservoir. I'm speaking to you through a mask, of course, and I am somewhat indignant that not all of my

fellow New Yorkers are masked as Governor Cuomo and comments. sense have asked them to be. It's the strangest thing, especially on the part of runners. They just don't feel they want to or they need to or something of that kind. It reflects a certain kind of what looks like arrogance on the part of a lot of people going around the reservoir. There is better social distancing going on now than there was, say, a week ago when I would come out, but not adequate. Now, a lady just pulled her bandana up when she saw me looking at her reproachfully. My children accused me regularly of being unduly coercive about these things. But back in the days when you could travel, we would go to Rome, and there was a tiny police corps right at the Trevi Fountain, whose only job was to keep Americans from putting their feet in the water.

And I loved their efficiency and their efficiousness. And my children would always claim that my ideal job would be to be a member of the fountain police. So I feel like lecturing all of these non-participant, non-excuse me, this is an innocent cough caused by the presence of this mask. But people are running around the reservoir, but are not too much on top of one another. And one never knows looking at these scenes these days, whether to applaud the human insistence on continuing,

on continuing with some version of normal life, or look aghast at the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life. That's the mystery of a pandemic. Thank you from my kitchen in Oakbrook with a nice top on and my sweatpants on the bottom. I'm really sad that we're not together in person, but either way, I feel so grateful

and humbled to be graduating with all of you guys. Our class is really full of the type of people that I would want to be my doctor or to be the doctor of my mom or my dad. We're celebrating in circumstances that were beyond our imagining a few weeks ago. And still we've held ourselves with grace, compassion, and courage to uplift and serve our communities. I will miss our class. Please remember that we will always be a family. A very brilliant attending once told me that tough times don't go. character, they revealed character. The reason I wanted to study medicine is I think not different from any of you.

I wanted to be a protector, someone whose job it was to shield others from harm. Some of us maybe moving across the country, there is some small sense of sadness to this, but overall a great sense of pride and what we have... Congratulations, today is our day. We're graduating in our pajamas. We're so glad to be here with all of you. Congratulations, first generation doctors. Salud. Congrats. Yeah, we did it.

Go get them, lions. Congratulations. We're coming for you, coronavirus. I love you guys. I love you guys. I wish I could. That's the graduating class of the Columbia University Medical School in April 2020. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. On April 15th, 2020, our writers and photographers fanned out across New York, some in the real world, some virtually. to document life on a single day as the pandemic hit the city so brutally hard. The result was a special section of the New Yorker magazine and this special episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, we didn't pick April 15th at random.

Experts had said that the coronavirus pandemic would peak around then as the state's March lockdown order finally began to reduce transmission of the virus. So today, as we note the anniversary of shutdowns and restrictions, put in place all around the country, we're remembering what it was like right at that terrifying start. We'll continue now on April 15th as evening fell in the city. Hey, hey, what's up? How are you?

Good. Are you ready for me? I'm ready. Yeah, are you ready for? Sarah Larson went over to her neighbor's apartment just before 7 p.m. When people all over the city lean out their windows to cheer and clap or make some kind of noise, for the hospital staff and all the city's essential workers. Okay, you got the mask. Okay.

Yeah. Their building is in the East Village, the old heart of the counterculture in New York. The clap was just starting in the East Village, and it was really sad the first couple times. We had see these videos on Instagram of, like, Italy and stuff, in France, and it was amazing. And even the Upper West and Upper East,

we saw Instagram stories up there, and it was awesome. So Carly and I kind of... Sarah's neighbors, John Fredericks and Carly Growen, wanted to add something special to the cheering. So John got out his guitar and put his amplifier on the fire escape. It's 7 o'clock. Oh, my God. You want to call?

You're welcome to. Thank you so much. Seven o'clock, with its noise, its joyful cacophony, seems to bring the whole city together in a kind of primal scream. And after that, it gets quiet again. These downtown streets normally packed into the late hours with people from all over the city

with tourists and college kids who have been partying just a little bit too hard are now empty. The city that never sleeps seems to turn in a lot earlier than usual. A few blocks to the north, the New Yorker's Paige Williams is near Union Square.

She's there to meet with members of a police department unit called the Mobile Crisis Outreach Team. And their goal is to connect the homeless population, particularly the chronic homeless, with city services like health care and mental health assessments. Lately, they've been out talking to as many people as they can find about COVID and about the dangers of the coronavirus and what they can do to protect themselves and other people.

So we've been out probably for an hour and a half, maybe two hours talking to various folks. The team had met. These were two uniformed officers and a nurse who is detailed to their unit and their commander, Phyllis Byrne. Inspector Byrne was in the middle of a sentence when suddenly she stopped talking and started running. May for a minute. Across the street, she had seen a man who was on fire. What's happening there? I don't know. Want to go? Everyone went running after her. and she had stopped a guy who had stuck a lit pipe in his pocket and whose coat had started burning.

It's all right. I actually saw the flame coming out of you back. Yeah, it must have been the... I've got to go take this off now. Thanks. Yeah. So, let's have a second. What's your name?

Gerish. Gerish. Hi, how are you? I'm fine. I'm fine. So do you have a place to stay tonight? I don't. I'm actually homeless.

You are? Okay. Okay, so are you in the subway normally? Yeah. Okay. So would you be interested in us trying to find a place? All right. All right for now.

I'm actually getting in touch with the few friends and they're going to help me get some. And sometimes they're able to help the person get to a place of shelter for the night. Sometimes they know that all they can do is help the person understand how to be safe. Well, how about this? I have this. It's a mask, so you can drill down the one of the virus, right? It's some hand sanitizer, a couple of masks, and some handwens.

Yeah, that would be great. They gave him the masks, they gave him the hand sanitizer, and beyond that, all they could do was watch him go. We'll be around, then you have the numbers. I do have the number, and if I need anything, I'm going to ask. There if cops over there. I'm going to ask him for help. Okay.

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Information and reservations go to the ground transportation center in the arrival hall. For taxis proceed to the taxi stand just outside of the building where a uniform taxi dispatcher will assist you. Terminal 4 is the busiest terminal ever. I call it, I say, there isn't a chill pill for Cibon 4.

Now we're chilling Full time How many do you get a day In total, you think? How many what? Passengers? A day. But the maximum is going to be like

You could say 15, 20 per day If they're that. But most of the time, most of the day we spend Doing absolutely nothing. They get boring? Bored? Of course we do, but we get a cost of low.

We are still happy that we're here We got a job still. That's not important. Yeah. But we hope that all of this is going to come to an end soon, and civilization is going to come back. Kathy Ann McKenzie, a taxi dispatcher at Kennedy Airport, talking with Zach Hellfan.

When Laura Colby shows up for her hospital shift, she's given a list of watchers, people she needs to watch. She's an internist, and the watchers are patients at risk of death. On a recent night, all of those patients had COVID-19. Dr. Colby's job is to save their lives, but she spoke with Rachel LeVee about how to help those patients who are just not going to make it.

How do you kind of facilitate in what way has that been altered? Yeah, I think one of the greatest fears among patients who come into the hospital, really anywhere in America right now, is dying alone, not having communication with family, feeling like they would be neglected or ignored by the medical system. Initially, I think things were very ad hoc.

I think really lovely nurses and doctors and staff members of all kinds were using their own smartphones and other forms of technology to try to facilitate video chats and phone calls for patients and their families and just trying to get them to see each other, speak with each other as much as they possibly could. One thing that's really tough about profound respiratory diseases is that there is this communication imbalance between the sick and the well. And so you can have loved ones on the other side of the camera kind of desperate to speak, but also to listen to their loved one, to hear the wisdom or love or whatever the last words of their loved one might be. and I think that's kind of one of the things that's lost often for patients who are hypoxic and out of breath and kind of subject to coughing fit.

You know, one of my closest friends is actually a palliative care doctor, and I feel like she uses the phrase all the time, like, bearing witness. When we talk about bearing witness, what is it due for the receiver? I think it's the most basic level, the most basic selfish level, it is comforting in the sense of a golden rule that we will all at some point be dying. We will all at some point lose the use of our senses and our ability to speak. And so I think it is incumbent on all of us to bear witness to each other's dying, then the same grace will be extended to us when we are in our last moments.

On April 15th, some 2,500 people died in America from the coronavirus. More than 500 lives were lost here in New York City alone. And some lives, of course, began. Among them, Christopher John Sintran Jr., born at 9.18 p.m. What does he look like to you? Like, what is he liked? Like, what is he... Fregn perfect.

He's got a full head of dark hair. Yeah. These dark gray eyes. I think they're going to be blue because me and my husband's... have blue eyes. Yeah. And he's just such a good baby. Yeah.

He's so good. He hardly cries. Wow. I kind of got him spoiled. Christopher has come into a world that his parents no longer quite understand that nobody alive really understands fully. But for Christopher, this catastrophe will be a thing that he learns about from family stories and history books. His mother, Lisa Cintran, talked to Gia Tolentino. It's, like, there's something really particular about giving birth at a time like,

this, right? Where our thoughts are thinking about, I don't know, like danger and, you know, and panic and the future is so scary, but... They have no immune systems and it sucks because my family, we're very close and nobody's going to be able to see him for months until this is all cleared. I have five beautiful nieces that have been FaceTime, and they're all little. But they're so excited That's their first cousin And we just so long for him Yeah Oh

Yeah So we've been FaceTiming like every day Oh wow Yeah I know I don't know for me personally You know I still am very scared of delivery Like it seems like painful and horrible And

But I think in the midst of this crisis I think so much of it has just narrowed my thinking So it's like literally the only thing I hope for is that I don't test positive while like when I go into the hospital. I know. It's so scary. Like even being on the floor, hearing like that there are some moms that have tested positive. One of the nurses asked if I wanted to put the baby in the nursery.

And my first question was, were there any babies that, you know, their mom tested positive? They said, no, no, they wouldn't be in the nursery. And then I felt okay sending him. But at that rate, I was ready to just be even more sleep. and just keep them in here for safety. Yeah, right, right. And he was delivered at the peak of the crisis in New York City, which is the peak of the global, you know, outbreak.

Like, what do you think that you'll be telling him? Because he was a miracle and all of it. Yeah. I mean, look at how much sadness and heartbreak people are going through, losing their loved ones, and I get to bring this little guy in the world. Yeah. A miracle. Yeah.

Lisa Sintran talking with the New Yorkers, Gia Tolentino, last year. This hour, we've been telling the story of New York City on April 15th, 2020, a Wednesday. It was a very hard day. So many people across the country received the phone call that nobody ever wants to get. Our writers who had been documenting the city all day long turned in to finally get some sleep before they had to file their stories in the morning. And on April 16th, a new day began. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank everyone at The New Yorker who participated and recorded their interviews for this special episode of the program.

And thank you all for joining us today. And if you think of it, let us know what you thought on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. And please, above all, keep staying safe until this pandemic is behind us once and for all. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYSy. Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby,

Cala, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. Today's episode was produced with special assistance from Crystal Duhayne, and additional help from Monica Rassick and Micah Hauser. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.